NEW RESOURCES

California Polytechnic State University: Digitized Student Newspapers Provide Access To Campus History. “The library’s Special Collections and Archives folks decided to digitize Mustang News in honor of the 100-years celebration. Digital Archivist Zach Vowell, Digital Repository Coordinator Michele Wyngard and student assistants scanned all the microfilm copies. Collectively, they scanned 75,000 pages! Vowell and his team image-processed each issue and ran them through Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which allows users to execute the Search function within any issue. Overall, the team digitized 7,138 issues, which comes to more than 75 million words!”

New from the Georgia Archives: Colonial Conveyances. From this page: “The Colonial Conveyances are the equivalent of property deeds. They are the recorded property transactions between private citizens in the Colony of Georgia. Colonists who received land grants from the Trustees or the Crown could sell or otherwise convey their land or other property to other private citizens. The conveyances consist primarily of property transfers, usually land purchases. Related documents, such as schedules of personal property and marriage agreements, may be recorded along with the conveyance. … The first volume, 1750 – 1761, contains conveyances and other documents recorded during the period when the colony was governed by the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia, 1732 – 1752. The State of Georgia did not pass a law requiring that deeds be recorded in the county where the property was located until 1785. Deed books for Georgia’s early counties do not begin until 1785-1786, with the exceptions of Liberty and Glynn Counties. Look for Georgia deeds from 1776 to 1785 in Colonial Conveyances.”

Digital NC: Newspaper serving Lumbee Tribe members in Robeson County, The Carolina Indian Voice, is now available. “Almost ten years of The Carolina Indian Voice, a newspaper out of Pembroke, North Carolina, are now up on DigitalNC thanks to our partner the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Carolina Indian Voice was established in 1973 and was published on a weekly basis until 2005. Issues from 1996-2005 are now available digitally. The paper primarily served the interests of members of the Lumbee Tribe living in Robeson County, who make up more than a third of the population of Robeson County and almost 90% of the town of Pembroke.”

This was published last month, but I just came across it. From Iceland Magazine: Icelandic spelling, declension and etymology dictionaries now free online. “In an effort to protect the Icelandic language in a time of smart phones and computers The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies at the University of Iceland has opened a website which offers free access to the institutes large catalogue of dictionaries, including etymology- and spelling dictionaries and the institute’s declension database for the Icelandic language. Hhighschool teachers are especially urged to introduce the site to their students.” The site is in Icelandic, but Google Translate handles it.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ubergizmo: Bing Fact Check Labels Now Visible In Search Results. “To combat the surge in fake news, Google started adding fact check findings to search and news results earlier this year. It started working with fact checking organizations like PolitiFact and Snopes for this purpose. Bing is now doing something similar. Microsoft’s search engine will now display a fact check label in search results to help users find fact checking information on news and webpages within search results.”

Arizona Secretary of State: AZSOS and UA receive grant to continue digitizing Arizona’s newspapers. “The Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records (link is external) (LAPR), in partnership with the University of Arizona, has received a $279,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue digitizing historic newspaper collections. This is the 4th such grant received by LAPR. Since 2008, LAPR digitized approximately 380,000 pages and made them available on both the Library of Congress’ ‘Chronicling America’ site and on the Arizona Digital Historic Newspapers platform (link is external). This new grant adds another 100,000 pages, bringing the total online newspaper collection to nearly half a million pages.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Check Which Firefox Extensions Will Stop Working in Firefox 57 . “For a long time, Firefox’s addon system meant that a bad extension could cause issues in your browser, or even be malware posing as helpful. To remedy this, the upcoming Firefox 57 is making a big switch. From that version on, Firefox will use addons that are similar to what Chrome uses — they can’t modify the browser’s code, so they pose less of a threat.”

Small Business Trends: What Is a Bing Business Bot and How Does Your Small Business Get One?. “An employee’s day can easily be derailed by customers calling to ask the same questions over and over again; Are you open today? Where can I pay my bill? How do I find your prices? Where are you located? So, it’s easy to understand the necessity Bing sees in creating chatbots for small businesses. Chatbots save your paid employees time, which saves you money.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: Facebook Navigates an Internet Fractured by Governmental Controls. “Populous, developing countries like Vietnam are where the company is looking to add its next billion customers — and to bolster its ad business. Facebook’s promise to Vietnam helped the social media giant placate a government that had called on local companies not to advertise on foreign sites like Facebook, and it remains a major marketing channel for businesses there. The diplomatic game that unfolded in Vietnam has become increasingly common for Facebook. The internet is Balkanizing, and the world’s largest tech companies have had to dispatch envoys to, in effect, contain the damage such divisions pose to their ambitions.”

TechCrunch: Snap blocks Al Jazeera in Saudi Arabia to “comply with local laws”. “Snap has bowed to pressure from the government of Saudi Arabia to censor a news channel operated by the Qatar-based news broadcaster, Al Jazeera, from the Snapchat Discover section of its app. The development was reported earlier by the WSJ. Al Jazeera launched a Snap Discover channel in English in December 2015 — but only launched its Arabia news channel in May this year.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Buzzfeed: The Government Has Dropped Its Demand That Facebook Not Tell Users About Search Warrants. “In making the decision, prosecutors did not concede the legal arguments raised by Facebook and civil liberties and electronic privacy groups against the nondisclosure orders attached to the search warrants. According to court papers filed jointly by Facebook and the US attorney’s office in Washington on Wednesday, prosecutors determined that the underlying investigation that prompted the search warrants — the details of which are under seal — had ‘progressed … to the point where the [nondisclosure orders] are no longer needed.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Online Journalism Blog: 10 principles for data journalism in its second decade. “In 2007 Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel published The Elements of Journalism. With the concept of ‘journalism’ increasingly challenged by the fact that anyone could now publish to mass audiences, their principles represented a welcome platform-neutral attempt to articulate exactly how journalism could be untangled from the vehicles that carried it and the audiences it commanded. In this extract from a forthcoming book chapter* I attempt to use Kovach and Rosenstiel’s principles (outlined in part 1 here) as the basis for a set that might form a basis for (modern) data journalism as it enters its second and third decades.” Good morning, Internet…

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